Case Studies

Early Warning System for A Smart City

Industry: Governance

Introduction

A city must be managed and planned well to handle problems such as traffic congestion, air quality, water quality, water supply, energy supplies, and public health quality and so on. Rapid developments in information and communication technology (ICT) has had a profound impact on the way we live, work and play. By harnessing ICT, networks and data, development authorities seek to support better living, create more opportunities and support stronger communities.

Project journey

Our client, the Ministry of Communication & Information, of one of developed nations of Southeast Asia, wanted to embrace emerging technologies and use data to redefine what it means to be a 21st-century metropolis. They wanted a solution that would help them monitor copious amounts of social data available on the internet to recognize budding problems.

Objective:

The client wanted to listen to the voice of their citizens in quasi-real time, detect and understand top trending topics in different sectors, bring out citizen sentiment and send immediate alerts to the concerned department before it becomes viral.

Approach:

We proposed an application for monitoring the city via a single dashboard to help identify any potentially unwelcoming or harmful situation and summarize the condition of the city.

Using XPRESSO, our proprietary next generation content analytics engine that has an unmatched ability to understand the nuances of human expressions, we created an ‘Early Warning System’ to help our client in monitoring the city’s current affairs.

XPRESSO has a unique ability to classify the voice of citizen into different expression types (advocacy, suggestion, complaint, etc.) and relate them to the appropriate aspects and entities.

The application detects and tracks topics, activities and events, and analyses social conversations and statements; extracting and quantifying the sentiments, expression and emotions attached to them by using sophisticated algorithms based on advanced statistics that dynamically assigns different weights (depending on context, and learning from historical data) on various parameters.

For any significant temporal and/or spatial spikes in the negative sentiments and emotions like fear and anger, specific alerts are generated on the dashboard.

Business benefits:

Access public opinion

Use social media to measure public opinion on policies, as well as to better understand the sentiment of the average people living and working in the country, to make more informed decisions on new policies and evaluate existing policies

Safe guard reputation

Overseas investors and tourists can form impressions about a country and have opinions on whether the country offers suitable business environment and travelling facility available from forum discussions on social media; making it an important channel for governments to gain insight into the impact of these conversations on the country’s reputation

Improve disaster response

Disease outbreaks can be detected by correlating searches for symptoms of a specific illness; understanding of the ground situation after a natural disaster can also help optimize response and allocation of emergency resources

Access & mitigate potential crisis

Potential social unrest can be managed effectively through active listening, identifying noises and false information, and taking action to defuse or suppress them, such as issuing clarifying statements as necessary to dispel rumors

Transform security clearance process

Social Intelligence Government Solutions enables organizations to leverage high-value online data for national security, background investigations, program integrity, insider threat detection, and more